apache2-mpm-prefork vs apache2-mpm-worker

[mario.antonio]

Generally in a Debian installation if PHP mod is not used, apache2-mpm-worker is installed when you installed OPen-Xchange.
If you need to use mod-php5 in order to build a provisioning system using PHP, the apache2-mpm-prefork needs to be installed.

Can Open-Xchange be used with apache2-mpm-prefork (traditional non-threaded model) instead of apache2-mpm-worker (high speed threaded model) ?

Is there a performance trade?

My guess is that it isn't that important since what Apache is really doing is proxying requests to the the Java system

Any thoughts?

Regards,

M.A.

[Martin Heiland]

Hi,

the worker implementation of apache is the default version on most distributions. Open-Xchange will work with both implementations but we prefer mpm-worker - of course if you want to use php you'll need prefork. You're right, Open-Xchange has a pretty low usage profile at the webserver. Apache needs to serve the static html/css/images for the web interface and forward servlet requests via mod_proxy_ajp to the Open-Xchange backend. There are no calculations or connections done at the webserver in contrast to most groupware systems that are based on php. If you're running a installation with some thousand concurrent users you may experience a difference (maybe), but for small deployments there is no disadvantage known so far.

Greetings

[mario.antonio]

Martin,

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply!

So above 1000 users, would you recommend a separate server for the provisioning system?

In that case, I will need to enable SOAP to be accessible from outside:
Changing :
RMI_HOSTNAME=rmi://localhost:1099/

To

RMI_HOSTNAME=rmi://MY-OX-SERVER-IP:1099/

Am I right?

Regards,

M.A.

[Martin Heiland]

Hi,

above 1000 users i'd recommend to separate the open-xchange servers and the database, the webserver can run on the open-xchange servers. The provisioning daemons (open-xchange-admin) usually don't require much resources since they're only used when creating/modifying users, their idle resource footprint is very low. The RMI port is used by the commandline tools to access the open-xchange admin daemon so typically you don't need to open RMI for external interfaces.

Some more information about sizing and hardware requirements:

http://software.open-xchange.com/OX6/doc/whitepaper/OX6-Sizing-whitepaper.pdf

We also have the capability to cluster the open-xchange servers just in case you want to separate more. If you're planing a real large deployment it often more useful to set up separate instances on medium-size systems instead of running the services on one very-large system in terms of reliability, scalability and failover. We're also offering commercial support and deployment help for large environments, just check out the Hosting Edition section at the website.

Greetings